February 10, 2004

The Passion

Actor Mel Gibson has produced a controversial new movie The Passion about the
last 12 hours of Jesus Christ which will appear in theatres in two weeks.
It is controversial for several reasons. Some people consider it to stimulate
anti-Semitism by blaming the death of Jesus on the Jews. The Jewish community
is divided on this issue. Some Protestants object to what they see as the mariolatry
of the film. The Passion is being heavily promoted, and is seen by Gibson and others
as an evangelical tool. It has been endorsed by Billy Graham and the Vatican.

The promotional web site is currently
in 18 languages, including
Aramaic
and
Latin. The Latin,
by the way, begins with a little error: the title, intended to be "The Story",
is L'Histoire, which is French; in Latin it would be Historia.
It is worth checking out for novelty's sake; you'll learn, for example, that
the ubiquitous FAQ ("Frequently Asked Questions") is Saepe Interrogata
("those things which are often asked").

From a linguistic point of view, the most interesting thing about the film
(which I haven't seen) is the fact that the dialogue is in what Gibson believes
to be the languages spoken in Israel 2000 years ago: Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin.
It isn't often that one gets to hear Aramaic spoken. Observant Jews still read
Aramaic routinely as it is the language of the Books of Daniel and Ezra and of
the Talmud, and a few prayers are recited in Aramaic. One of these is the
Kaddish, the prayer of
mourning. But as a spoken language Aramaic is on its last legs. Varieties of modern
Aramaic are spoken by small groups, mostly Jews and Christians, in
Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Israel. In most of these Aramaic
is moribund. (Details can be found
in the Ethnologue.)

The use of Aramaic as the main language of the film is authentic. Hebrew had passed
out of daily use in most of Israel several centuries earlier. Although it continued
to be used for religious purposes and continued to be spoken in a few areas, most
people in Israel at this time spoke Aramaic. A man from Nazareth would have had
Aramaic as his first language and Hebrew as a second language used largely for religious
purposes.

What is not authentic is the use of Latin. By this time, Latin, originally the
language of the area surrounding Rome, was spoken throughout
Italy, though even there it had not entirely replaced the indigenous languages.
In Pompeii, destroyed in 79 C.E., many of the street signs and graffiti are
in Oscan, a language related to Latin but quite distinct from it. Latin had also spread to some areas colonized by Rome.
However, in the Eastern Roman Empire, then as later, the lingua franca was not Latin
but Greek. Greek was widely used throughout the Mediterranean area before Rome rose to
power, and was extensively used in Rome itself. The upper classes were educated
by Greek-speaking slaves and often spoke Greek among themselves. Other people
often knew Greek through trade or by virtue of their contact with slaves, many of whom
were Greek-speaking. As Rome spread
eastward, the Roman army enlisted soldiers for whom Greek was the lingua franca.
Thus, Greek was widely known in Israel and the surrounding area and was also
the dominant language of the occupying Roman army. It is not an accident that most
of the New Testament was written in Greek and that
for the first few centuries most Christians read the Hebrew Bible in Greek.
A high-ranking Roman like Pontius Pilate, educated in Rome, undoubtedly spoke
both Latin and Greek, but very few of the local people spoke Latin.

It is a bit of a mystery why Gibson chose to use Latin rather than Greek
in a film that otherwise goes to considerable lengths to be authentic.
As far as I can tell, he hasn't offered an explanation. A guess is that
it reflects the fact that he is a conservative Catholic, one who rejects
the reforms of Vatican II and is reported to attend a Tridentine Mass, in Latin.
The use of Latin may reflect his personal attachment to Latin as the traditional
language of the Roman Catholic Church. It is true that Latin became the language
of the Church, but the origins of that church are in Israel, not Rome, and at the
time the dominant languages were Aramaic and Greek, not Latin.

[Update 2004/03/22: The Archaeological Institute of America has
an excellant commentary on the historical accuracy of The Passionhere.
It concurs that the use of Latin is not authentic.]